Chatt,Joseph

S.M. Godfrey and C.A. McAuliffe, in Modern Coordination Chemistry The Legacy of Joseph Chatt, G.J. Leigh and N. Winterton (eds), Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 2002, 79-88. 

Dewar s landmark contribution [32] did not receive much attention at the time it was published, possibly because the author did not seek to establish the experimental evidence for his model in subsequent publications. He seemed not to be very interested in the field of transition metal chemistry and was probably not aware that his description of the bonding in olefin silver complexes was supported by Raman studies reported a decade previously. In 1941, Harvey Taufen and coworkers had found that the olefin remained largely unchanged in its coordination to Ag+ and that the C=C bond was weakened only slightly by the formation of the olefin silver complex [36]. In contrast to Dewar, Joseph Chatt knew this paper and mentioned the results in a review on the mercuration of olefins, which like Dewar s article was also published in 1951 [37], In his paper, Chatt made a clear distinction between the olefin silver and olefin platinum complexes and argued that, in contrast to the ionized olefin silver(I) salts, in the olefin platinum(II) compounds the metal is present in a covalent state and not as an ion. He also believed that for Ag+ the d-shell was core like and not available in the manner necessary to stabilize the olefin-platinum bond [37]2. 

Fig. 7.13 Joseph Chatt at the time when he was the director of the Unit at the University of Sussex (photo from ref. 121 reproduced with permission of The Royal Society)...

G. J. Leigh, A Celebration of Inorganic Lives Interview of Joseph Chatt, Coord. Chem. Rev. 108, 4-25 (1991). 

Biography of Ernst Otto Fischer see Chap. 2, and for the biographies of Joseph Chatt and Gordon Stone see Chap. 7. 

M. I. Bruce Joseph Chatt R. S. Dickson P. J. Fraser Junji Furukawa... 

Joseph Chatt (1), School of Molecular Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex, England... 

Reminiscences of Joseph Chatt Drawn from Conversations and from the Recollections of Co-workers... 

---